4 posts tagged “thai”
There's a recipe in one of the Moosewood books I've always liked, where you make little one-bite wraps with spinach leaves, filling each with pinches ot peanuts, toasted coconut, and chopped raw limes. This is a grown up version of that, it sounds well fiddly to make but deeply yummy. Serves 4, no nutritional info given. From olive, February 2004.
- 6 small chopped shallots
- 3 cloves garlic
- 5 cm root ginger
- 3 mild red chillies, seeded and chopped
- 3 tbsps roasted salted peanuts
- 2 tsp shrimp paste
- 2 tbsps fish sauce
- 4 tbsps palm sugar (or light muscovado)
- 2 heads bok choi or lettuce
- 2 firm not too ripe mangoes, finely sliced lengthways
- Half a fresh coconut, shaved into shreds with a potato peeler
- Handful fresh basil, Thai if you can get it
- 4 spring onions, finely shredded lengthways
- 2 limes, halved
Blast the shallots, garlic, ginger and chillies in a food processor until well chopped but not mushy.
Crush the peanuts, keeping some texture.
In a pan, heat 200 ml water, the shallot mixture, the peanuts, shrimp paste, fish sauce and sugar. Boil hard, stirring, for 15 - 20 minutes until thick, dark, sticky and glossy.
Lay out everything on a platter, with the sauce in little bowls.
Take a leaf of bok choi or lettuce, lay on a slice of mango, spread with peanut sauce, add coconut, basil and onions. Squeeze with lime juice, roll and eat.
You'd have to be careful what bok choi you got, so there was a lot of leaf to white stalk. Spinach might be just as good as lettuce. Having to slice the mangoes that way round means no cheating and buying pre-prepared, you could do that but you'd have to rethink the physical structure of the wrap to allow for cubes of mango. It would mean you could have riper mango, though. This has the potential to be really, really sticky - get lots of wetwipes.
We had chicken, butternut squash and sweet potato dopiaza for tea the other night, and I took the remains to work for a cold lunch, and a vegetarian colleague asked me for the recipe. I wrote it up for her with various substitutions, but then today I found this, which sounds much more interesting. It claims only 422 calories per serving. Serves 8 - 10 as part of an Asian party buffet, I would say 4 - 6 as a main course with rice and maybe a sharp salad with it.From BBC Good Food December 2005.
- 5 tbsp vegetable oil
- 100 gms red Thai curry paste
- 2 tbsps light brown sugar or palm sugar if you can get it
- 2 medium butternut squash, peeled, deseeded, and cut into 4 cm chunks
- 2 x 400 gm cans coconut milk
- 200 ml carton coconut cream
- 1 tbsp fish sauce 2 tbsp lime pickle
- 3 lemongrass sticks, bruised
- 50 gms beansprouts
Heat the oil, add the curry paste, fry 2 minutes.
Add sugar, cook 4 minutes more until sticky and fragrant.
Add the squash, cook, stirring to coat, 2 - 3 minutes.
Pour in coconut milk and cream, add sauce, lime pickle and lemongrass.
Boil and then simmer for about half an hour until squash is tender but not too mushy. Top with beansprouts at the last minute.
The fairly low calorie count is a bit of a tease as that's based on the 8 - 10 servings. It's a bit rich for us, and you could reduce the count subtantially anyway - that's a lot of oil, and you could use low fat coconut milk and miss out the cream altogether. The recipe doesn't actually say what to do with the beansprouts, I've assumed - but they did seem fairly pointless and not relevant. If you did want a bit of crunch you could put shredded spring onion, coriander, and cucumber on top. The fish sauce is not very veggie, try a light soy / sherry mix instead. But ooh, I love lime pickle. Our local Indian takeway does a lamb in lime pickle sauce which is to die for. Oh, btw, I'd fish out the lemongrass before serving.
Another one from Umrats. We've since wandered off into dessert vodkas - Turkish Delight, Mint Matchmakers, jelly babies ... My favourite is still dill and garlic, though.
We use Kilner-type jars, which makes it easier to drain the vodka off the flavourings if it is getting too strong. Jars with metal lids don't work, as the metal gets eaten away.
For the Thai one, we used a large jar, and added a knob of ginger about as big as the ball of your thumb, sliced up, two stems of lemon grass, crushed, the shredded peel of one lime, two roughly chopped chillies, seeds and all. We did say that next time we would add some basil and maybe a little honey, and if you're not partial to chilli you could reduce it to one and/or leave the seeds out. That took about two-thirds of a bottle of vodka. Cheap is fine, in fact it would be a waste of the good stuff. Something from your local backstreet offy or off the back of a Ford transit is good, provided the alcohol count is high.
Stick booze in with flavourings, seal and put in the dark and cool for about a week, shaking every day. If it seems to have picked up enough flavour, you can decant it and label it, or leave it for longer if you like. If you're in a hurry, you can mix it all straight in the bottle and keep in the freezer, which speeds it all up by breaking down the cellular structure of the organic material in the flavourings, and takes about 24 hours rather than the full week.
If you've used sweet or fruit flavours (berries, melon, etc.) you can keep the fruits after they've marinaded and use them for filling gateaux, roulades, or as ice-cream toppings.
The Russian way to drink it is with zakuski, which is their idea of starters. Every other New Year we have a Russian evening, with a great variety of vodkas, and lots of little foods - last year's draft menu was:
Zakuski (Starters)
* Whole cold salmon with orange hollandaise
* Whole Ham baked with seed and mustard crust
* Hot chicken/turkey Satsivi (mild walnut korma)
* Hot meatballs in plum and cinnamon sauce
* Hot meatballs in sour cream and paprika sauce
* Hot meatballs in dill pesto
* Mushroom pirogi (little pies)
* Cabbage pirogi with caraway seed crust
* Onion and egg pirogi
* Cheese pirogi
Salads including beetroot in sour cream, beetroot with walnut, cucumbers, mushrooms, celery, radishes, egg, potato, green salad.
Pates including Mushroom and Bulgar (cracked wheat), *Chicken Liver, Celebration Cheese Pate.
Cold Meats.
Smoked Fish including *Smoked Mussels, *Smoked Oysters, Smoked Salmon.
Variety of marinated herrings.
Breads and biscuits including pumpernickel, rye bread, cheese straws, plain bread.
Pickles & Sauces including *Mushrooms, *Pickled Pears, *Sweet Spiced Prunes, Dill Pickles, Mustard and Dill Sauce, Cranberry Sauce.
Cheeseboard.
There is no main course.
Desserts
*Individual Rum Babas
*Double Chocolate Rasberry Truffle Cake
*Mazurek (Polish Christmas Glace Fruit Bars)
*Cold Rice Pudding with Hot Cherry Sauce
*Stem Ginger Trifle
Non-alcholic trifle for kids
Fresh fruit.
Flavoured vodkas we have on the go are:
Lemon and lime
Sour cherry
Dill
Peach
Cinnamon
Caraway
Chilli
Thai
and there will be some sweet gloopy vodka-based liqueurs as well.
(end of menu)
The vodka is stored in bottles in the freezer, so it is served ice-cold and accumulates a coating of solid ice as the condensation on the outside of the bottle refreezes.
The eldest person at the table starts by making a toast, and then the toasts go around the table. For each toast you pick a mouthful-sized bit of food, and an appropriately flavoured vodka. (This is where the dill and garlic vodka comes in, it is fantastic with smoked salmon.) To make sure the flavours meld properly, you:
1) breathe in
2) knock back the vodka in one
3) pop the food in your mouth
4) breathe out slowly through your nose
5) chew and swallow
6) start again
The flavoured fumes pass over the taste sensors in your nose and mix with the food. Pick the wrong choice and you're in big trouble ... toffee and chocolate vodka does not go with cabbage in sour cream sauce, trust me on this one!
Some of the sweet ones are excellent: we mixed a melon vodka with green ginger wine, or made more "artificial" ones using industrial food flavourings supplied by a friendly chemist. There's a Delia recipe for glace / crystallised fruit soaked in Madeira, which works on the same principle, but where the fruit is the main end result, not the liquid.
If you want to add to the finished product, you can add honey or a sugar syrup for sweetness, glycerine for a more solid, gloopy, liqueur-type texture. If it is fake liqueurs you're after, try the flavour concentrate they sell next to the coffee in good supermarkets, or in independent coffee shops - in America you used to be able to get concentrates that told you in Very Broad Hints what they were mimicking, with instructions about which base booze to add them to.
Experimentation is the key to fun!
We often have the drgourmet Thai Cucumber Salad, as a side with Thai or Indian dishes, or cold meat. It reminds John of a cucumber salad dressed with vinegar that his Gran used to make. I ring the changes every so often - I tend not to put the peanuts in at all, and have changed the coriander for mint, and added grated fresh ginger to it. I use bottled lime juice instead of the lime zest as well. So at core it's sweetened acid with Tabasco, and chopped onion.
In Amsterdam at Cafe Wanpipel on Albert Cuyp Straat, we had Surinamese food. There were Indian style curries, but served with Indonesian fried rice or noodles, and a big salad topping. Part of the salad was long cucumber chunks, that had been marinaded in something similar to the drgourmet dressing, but a lot browner, heavier and sweeter. I suspect palm sugar of some sort.
So I've been fiddling again. We're having home-made chicken satay tonight, using the sate spice mix I brought back from the Peperbol shop (again on Albert Cuyp Straat, part of the Mart).
I've cut the cucumber into long thick wedges, and sprinkled half a red onion in medium slices over it. I've mixed a dressing of: clear rice vinegar, black rice vinegar, fish sauce, Splenda, a tiny bit of dark maple syrup, quite a bit of Tabasco, and bottled lime juice. No herbs, I'm going to make a Chinese leaf salad as well, put the cucumber on top of that and add fresh coriander leaf at the end.
I'll make a peanut dipping sauce as well, similar to the drgourmet Thai Peanut Sauce. Peanut butter thinned down and with chilli of some kind in it, anyway. Grilled marinated chicken, and some plain boiled Jasmine Rice.
The drgourmet salad calorie count is 46 calories per cup of salad.
